A Conference at the Institute of Modern Languages Research, University of London
Thursday, 12 and Friday, 13 May 2016

Organizers: Caroline Bland (Sheffield) and Godela Weiss-Sussex (IMLR)

Call for Papers

In her essay 'Frauenheimat Männerwelt: Die Heimatlosigkeit ist weiblich', Elisabeth Bütfering noted in 1990 that gender difference had never yet been among the paradigms for discussion of the idea of Heimat. Since then, the critical engagement with a particularly feminine conception of, or attitude to, Heimat has gained momentum; some of the outstanding publications in the field being Gisela Ecker's collection of essays Kein Land in Sicht. Heimat - weiblich? (1997), Elizabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman's Heimat - A German Dream (2000), and Peter Blickle's Critical Theory of the German Idea of Homeland (2002). Scholars in the areas of history, memory studies and literary studies have since contributed to a growing body of knowledge on a gender-sensitive understanding of Heimat, opening the field to fruitful inter-disciplinary inquiry (see the publications by Julian Preece, Friederike Eigler, Christa Hämmerle in 2014 alone).
This conference aims to build on existing research and concentrate the enquiry on the analysis of conceptualisations of and attitudes to Heimat in the literature and the visual arts created by women in the German-speaking countries in the years before, during and after the First World War. The concept of Heimat, which had been rhetorically bolstered by the nation-building efforts of the late 19th century, was transformed during the war and its immediate aftermath, when it was often conflated with the idea of patriotism and enveloped in chauvinist rhetoric. At the same time, however, more progressive ideas emerged that allowed room for the construction of multiple and transferable locations of Heimat. In some cultural productions by women, Heimat appears as a notion central to women's concerns and an area in which they had a specific contribution to make. Others, however, objected to the way in which the traditions promoted by the notion of Heimat served to reinforce patriarchy and developed new paradigms of thinking.
We invite papers of ca. 20 minute length (in English or German) that address these issues. Questions of particular interest include, but are by no means restricted to: